Hi there! I launched this blog yesterday and this is my “first” entry here! I imported all the posts from my previous blog and I’m going to close it within a couple of months. So, subscribe or bookmark this one if you like it!😉

Inspired by some interviews with polyglots and a story from a Korean friend, who says he mastered Japanese within a month, I decided to learn Korean! Actually, I have no plan to use it, but I just want to see if it’s easier to learn a similar language than it is to learn more distant… Continue reading I started Korean!

I got a question from a Japanese learner about how to use 生きる (ikiru) and 住む (sumu) correctly.Both can be translated as “to live” in English, but they are not exactly the same in Japanese. (Old houses in Kawagoe, Japan) 生きる means “to lead a life” or “to survive,” and its opposite word is 死ぬ (shinu), “to die”.1) 私たちは生きるために水が必要です。(わたしたちは… Continue reading Differences and Usages: いきる vs. すむ

It might be a bit late, but I’d like to say New Year’s greetings with my calligraphy! I’m not sure if this can be called calligraphy, but I can’t come up with a more appropriate word for it right now. In Japanese, it’s called アート書 (art sho), literally meaning “artistic letters” or “letter art”, or… Continue reading Happy New Year!

I signed up to “HiNatie”, an online language/cultural exchange community managed by the Lang-8 team.http://hinative.com/ It’s available not only on iPhone app but also on PCs and Macs.You can ask some brief questions about a language, region and culture you are interested in.I’ll see how it works. 🙂

This is a sequel to the previous entry. We’ve talked about the first two rules in the previous entry. Here is the third one: An adverb should appear closer to the word(s) it is modifying. Let’s look at the first picture. (Click it to see a bigger picture.) I used some dashed arrows with すこし,… Continue reading Word Order in Japanese: Adverbs #2